Project 🔨 Day 12 - Networking Advent Calendar

The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this? Missed Day 1? Read more here.

Day 12: Post about a personal project

Last year I worked with a product designer friend of mine. He has 20+ years of experience designing for print and digital products, and worked for household names like Google. We were both thinking about how to help jobseekers, so I asked him, if he were to look for a job now, what would he do? He said:

"I would not apply to any jobs directly. I would create a huge project and let it blow up on the internet for companies to notice me.”

When you don’t have 20 years of experience, you might not have his level of confidence. You might even think, “of course he can do that, he’s got a killer resume”. But, notice that he’s not using his resume to land jobs in his plan. He wants to directly show his skills.

Different from yesterday’s “share one achievement”, the task today focuses less on the outcome, more on your skills and approach used in solving a problem in your field. We all know that hiring teams these days will always ask about your personal projects, so why not follow our experienced designer and share it before you have to apply to a job?

What

It’s up to you how you want to go about sharing your personal project. Here are some ideas to get you inspired:

• First, what made you want to create this personal project? Was it to use your newly learned technical skills? Was it because you encountered this problem in real life and wanted to solve it? Was it that you saw a similar project and were inspired? Was it just out of curiosity?

• What were the steps you took to create this project?

• What were the main tools and methods used?

• What were the biggest challenges in this project and how did you conquer them?

• What were the desired and actual outcomes?

How

You can also choose whatever format or media you’d like:

• A blog

• A presentation

• A video

• A few graphics

• A series of Tiktoks

• A Twitter thread

Where

Share your project publicly so that they can be discovered by others. You can share it on:

• Your professional social media like LinkedIn

• Other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok (better virality)

• Your personal website

• The professional communities you’re in since there’s a more focused audience

Good luck and have fun!

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Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!